Apple has long denied the use of touchscreen on its Mac computers. Windows laptop manufacturers have been integrating touch screens on their machines for a long time now. In the product video of the MacBook Air in 2010, Phil Schiller, Apple’s SVP of Worldwide Marketing said that the company had experimented with touchscreens but found them to be difficult to interact and instead went with improving the gesture system of the trackpad.
Phil Schiller explained that, holding fingers in the air and tapping on the screen of a laptop just does not seem right. Apple has largely improved its trackpads over the years while Windows is still playing catch-up. The trackpads on the MacBooks are now just massive and the company could possibly be planning to add more new gestures to the system.
Over the years, Apple has always long maintained its stance on the controversial topic of merging the tablet and the desktop as a “definite no”. The company has at multiple events suggested that it would never merge macOS and iOS. Apple thinks that both the desktop and the tablet serve different needs and work in different ways; combining them would be a mistake.
However, in the past two years, Apple has unveiled tools for developers to bring iPad apps to the Mac and also released SwiftUI, a framework that helps developers create apps for both iOS and Mac at the same time. It appears as if Apple is working on merging macOS and iOS to some extent afterall.
We would not be surprised if Apple does indeed bring touchscreens to the Mac platform. Well, I have always hated the idea of having touchscreen on a MacBook but maybe Apple could find an innovative to do so.
Would you like a MacBook with touch input support? Comment your thoughts down below.
